Teilhard de Chardin’s Evolving Consciousness

The Jesuit philosopher/theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin envisioned the evolution of consciousness as axial in a grand cosmic system of continuing complexification where consciousness becomes planetized and even “God” is an emergent in a process of “theogenesis” (Delio, 2020). Teilhard helped coin the concept of a “noosphere,” describing “the layer of mind, thought and spirit within the layer of life covering the earth” (Teilhard de Chardin, 1964).

Noosphere and Rise of Consciousness

According to theologian (and former neuroscientist) Ilia Delio, Teilhard has the total material universe “in movement toward a greater unified convergence” such that “as life systems unite and form more complex relationships, consciousness rises.” Teilhard, she says, “speaks of evolution as the rise of consciousness toward a hyper-personalized organism, what he called an irreversible personalizing universe.” He speaks of “the human person as a co-creator. God evolves the universe and brings it to its completion through the human person.” Now the computer, according to Teilhard, “has evoked a new level of shared consciousness, a level of cybernetic mind giving rise to a field of global mind through interconnecting pathways” (foreshadowing the internet) (Delio, 2021).

Mind, Matter, and Evolution

Teilhard was a dual-aspect monist. He “considered matter and consciousness not as two substances or two different modes of existence, but as two aspects of the same cosmic stuff.” Mind and matter “are neither separate nor is one reducible to the other, and yet neither can function without the other.”

From the Big Bang onward, Delio says, Teilhard has “a ‘withinness’ and ‘withoutness,’ or what he called radial energy and tangential energy. Consciousness is, in a sense, the withinness or ‘inside’ of matter, and attraction is the ‘outside’ of matter; hence, the energy of matter is both attractive (tangential) and transcendent (radial).” The complementarity of mind and matter is said “to explain both the rise of biological complexity and the corresponding rise of consciousness.” Teilhard identifies “the core energy of the universe as love, which both unifies and transcends by way of consciousness. The greater the exterior levels of physical complexity, the greater the interior levels of consciousness” (Delio, 2021).

To Teilhard, evolution describes “the dynamic impulse in life toward more being and consciousness,” and that which drives evolution is consciousness. In short, “evolution is the rise of consciousness.” Following Julian Huxley, he writes that the human person “is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself”—and adds, “The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself” (Teilhard de Chardin, 1959). The human person is “the point of emergence in nature, at which this deep cosmic evolution culminates and declares itself” (Delio, 2021).

Moreover, “the presence of mind in matter and the openness of matter to greater wholeness is the religious phenomenon of nature.” Radically unorthodox, Teilhard sees this reality as the incarnation of God, where “God and world are in a process of becoming a new reality together.” Simply put, Delio says, “we cannot speak of God apart from human evolution, an idea that led Teilhard to state that God and world form a complementary pair. God and world are entangled with one another to the extent that talk of God is impossible apart from talk about nature and creative change, and talk of nature makes no sense apart from God” (Delio, 2021).

In summary, Teilhard describes “matter as the matrix of consciousness.” He posits “the law of complexity-consciousness” as a fundamental principle of evolution, and conversely, “evolution is fundamentally the rise of consciousness.” Moreover, the human person is “evolution become conscious of itself,” with the ultimate goal of “the maximization of thought,” whereby consciousness radiates “throughout the whole, in every aspect of the cosmos,” and then of “self-reflective consciousness,” whereby “the human person can stand apart from the world and reflect on it” (Delio, 2023, pp. 30–32).

Omega and Ultimate Convergence

Finally, the foundation of Teilhard's paradigm is “Omega,” which he sees as the “prime mover of evolution,” the unifying power in evolution. Omega works its guiding magic from the very beginning of things, “acting on pre-living cosmic elements,” moving into consciousness as it emerged as the goal toward which evolution complexifies and converges. “Omega is the absolute whole,” making “wholeness in nature not only possible but also intensely personal. Teilhard identifies Omega with God” (Delio, 2023, p. 35).